The present disclosure generally relates to break-fix support. The disclosed embodiments relate more specifically to a system, apparatus, method, and computer program product for providing a break-fix simulator for training and testing support technicians.
In the information technology (IT) industry, the term “break-fix” generally is used to refer to the work involved in supporting an IT solution when that solution fails, or breaks, and needs intervention by some support organization to be restored, or fixed, to working order. Under the break-fix model, a customer who has purchased an IT solution from an IT solution provider contacts a support technician at the IT solution provider when the customer experiences problems with its IT solution. That contact may be in the form of a telephone call and/or a written incident report in which the customer provides a description of the problem(s) it is experiencing with the IT solution. The support technician then accesses the IT solution and attempts to resolve the problem(s) based on the description provided by the customer.
Because an IT solution provider's customers generally are not as knowledgeable about the underlying technology in an IT solution as the IT solution provider, the descriptions provided to support technicians by those customers often are general and directed to the result of the problem, rather than its cause. And the same result may have several different causes. Moreover, different customers may describe the same problem differently. Such descriptions often make it difficult for support technicians to diagnose and resolve problems in an efficient, repeatable manner.
Those difficulties are compounded when the IT solution provider supports many different products with many different releases. Not only must a support technician be able to interpret different customers' different descriptions in an efficient, repeatable manner, they also must do so for a large number of products and product releases. Training support technicians on such a large scale presents a serious logistical challenge. Moreover, creating different tutorials for such a large number of products and product releases would require a large amount of resources.